Re: [libvirt] virsh blockresize syntax is inconsistent with vol-resize and somewhat dangerous

On 10/25/19 4:28 AM, Patrik Martinsson wrote: > Hi Tim, > > I recently stumbled on the same thing, accidentally shrinking a blockdevice. > > I have written a patch for virsh that will force the user to append a > '--force' flag if shrinking is desired. > > The behavior is somewhat still inconsistent with the vol-resize > command, however a bigger rewrite is needed to make both commands > operate exactly the same, which I don't know if actually needed. > > Previous discussion can be found below, > - https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2019-October/msg00258.html > - https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2019-October/msg01437.html > > Best regards, > Patrik > > > On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 6:04 PM Tim Small <tim(a)seoss.co.uk&gt; wrote: >> >> Hello, >> >> virsh has two commands which can be used to resize block devices - >> "blockresize" for volumes in use by and active guest, and "vol-resize" >> for volumes which are not in use. >> >> The vol-resize syntax allows to specify the size as a delta (increase or >> decrease vs. the current size), and also refuses to shrink a volume >> unless the "--shrink" argument is also passed. >> >> Most other tools which can be used for block device resizing (outside of >> libvirt) also have similar "--shrink" argument requirements when >> reducing the size of an existing block device. e.g. ceph requires >> "--allow-shrink" when using the "rbd resize" command. >> >> The lack of such a safety device makes "blockresize" a foot-gun (which I >> recently found to great effect when I typoed the domain name to another >> valid domain). >> >> It seems I am not alone in making this error e.g. >> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=902171 >> >> One possible solution would be to make a new command e.g. "domblkresize" >> or perhaps "live-resize", which implement the "--shrink" and "--delta" >> behaviour to make it consistent with "vol-resize" syntax, and mark the >> "blockresize" command as deprecated in the documentation and help (so >> that existing automation which depends on the current behaviour doesn't >> break). >> >> Any thoughts? Should I open this as an RFE? >> Considering there's been multiple people hitting it, I think it's something we should fix in libvirt. Just need buy in from other devs. To summarize: 'virsh blockresize' will online resize an image path for a running VM. It does this with the qemu block_resize monitor command via the virDomainBlockResize API. The API doesn't provide any protection against shrinking the disk image though, which I presume is both the less common intention of the operation, and much less often safe to do for a running VM. And a user typo can mean data loss virsh vol-resize, which is storage API virStorageVolResize, is for offline image resizing, mostly using qemu-img. It has had a SHRINK API flag from the outset, rejecting requests to reduce the image size unless the flag is passed. Seems like a safe pattern to follow. Can we change existing blockresize behavior? I think it's reasonable; we've added flags to other APIs that are required to restore old behavior, UNDEFINE_NVRAM for one example.